With the growing reliance on information systems technology and the Internet, the number of cyber-attacks is increasing at an alarming rate. Further complicating the issue, cyber threats are continuing to evolve with increasing complexity impacting consumers, businesses and governmental entities every day. Hacking attempts are on the rise throughout government and private industry. According to cyber threat information provided by the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon reports getting 10 million hacks per day, the State of Utah faces 20 million attempts, and the energy company BP says it deals with 50,000 attempts per day. But these are only a small sample of the daily threats being encountered by information systems. Even more disconcerting is that many of these attacks are successful each year, costing hundreds of billions of dollars.
As cyber-attacks continue to increase and become more sophisticated, the need for security systems and highly trained experts to protect industry and government information systems is growing just as fast. This rapidly growing cyber security threat landscape coupled with the shortage of personnel with the expertise required to safeguard critical systems and sensitive information poses a serious security risk for the public and private sectors.
Unfortunately, current training methods are severely challenged to keep up-to-date and provide the training necessary to combat the threat. This highly complex security training has traditionally occurred in the classroom or has been provided by consultants with access to live systems evaluating real-time security threats as they occur. These existing training methodologies and techniques cannot keep up with the rapidly changing security threats nor can they train personnel fast enough. To further complicate existing training programs, real-life cyber threat scenarios become outdated by new threats shortly after training is introduced.
Current training systems are built with the specific target for training in mind and dedicated to staff and students as such. For example, some of these targets may include healthcare, cybersecurity, power grid network infrastructure, etc. Current training systems are customized with hardware, software, and built to satisfy the training needs of the targeted industry. Present day systems are generally static in nature and configured once for the targeted industry, then modified manually as training needs and technology changes.
This focused manual customization for each industry target in need of training increases the cost of the overall training system development and support, making current training systems expensive and too costly for most businesses desperately in need of such state of the art training. Such legacy training systems require extensive manual modification and on-going customization to keep up with the student's training needs and the rapid pace of technology evolution in each particular industry where training is required. This fast-paced evolution of technology quickly makes training systems obsolete and in need of revision to keep up with the continual flow of new students, new systems and new operational methods.
Further, even in those situations where computer implemented training systems have been developed, those systems suffer from similar problems. While these systems can be used to train a larger numbers of students, the training systems are not flexible and provide limited training benefits. For example, existing training systems are designed to implement fixed training sessions. That is, these training systems include one or more predesigned or fixed training applications. The training system simply implements that single fixed training application or selects from one of a small set of fixed training application. Thus, students see the same training environments over and over. If the operator desires to present student with a different training session or environment, an entirely new training application must be built and loaded into the training system.
This “select from fixed training sessions” configuration is consistent with the goal of existing training sessions: to create a training session in which a student practices or implements one or more specific tasks. In accordance with the task-based training, the training is used to train the student on a particular task and to increase their proficiency in implementing the task. However, in the real world, each cyber threat is very different. Thus, a student's ability to perform a particular designated task is insufficient in helping the student understand when to perform the task or how to use it in conjunction with other tasks or techniques in order to address a cyber threat.
Given the rapidly changing cyber threat risk and the constant attacks from hackers around the world, a dynamic, virtual network training system and method are needed to provide a closed, controlled network environment with the level of complexity needed to train experts how to rapidly respond to cyber-attacks, terrorism, and cyber-crime, and how to stop them.